More tech news, stop the ride, I wanna get off, you can't.
Time marches on, you're gonna be a cyborg soon, accept it.
Reviews are in for Intel's long-awaited ARC B580
gaming graphics card, and there is a consensus.
It's good. At just 250 bucks, the card consistently outperforms
the more expensive RTX 4060 and RX 7600
at both 1080p and 1440p, meaning for once,
Intel's first-party benchmarks acted just like Shakira's hips.
They don't lie, they didn't lie. The upgraded Ray Tracing and XE SS2 upscaling
worked pretty well, if not quite as efficiently as NVIDIA's, and while Frame Generation only officially
works in one game right now, F124, it's super good.
While many are celebrating the launch of a certified budget-friendly banger
after Intel's awkward launch of its first-gen ARC cards,
NVIDIA and AMD will almost certainly be unveiling
their own next-gen cards in the next couple of months.
NVIDIA's RTX 50 series was just teased in the new trailer for the Witcher 4,
which NVIDIA just helpfully pointed out in case you didn't understand what was meant
by trailer pre-rendered on an unannounced
NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU. Oh, did anyone see that?
What could it mean? Oh. Leaks claiming to show a third-party case
for the Nintendo Switch 2 have been circulating for a couple of weeks now,
and I'm no longer able to block them out of my mind
because freaking Dbrand posted a 3D animated mockup
for their own case, so maybe now we have to take the leaks seriously, or maybe we don't
because it's Dbrand. The other leaks show what may be telltale signs
of AI image generation, or maybe it's upscaling,
but either way, it would be super easy to create your own mockup and pass it off like this.
YouTuber SwitchUp actually 3D printed a model based on the leaks so you can get a feel
of what the Switch 2 might look like.
Damn it, Dbrand. Or you can get excited about much more reliable images
of Lenovo's upcoming Legion Go S handheld
posted by chronic leaker, Evan Blass.
It's allegedly a more affordable model without the detachable controllers
that some are speculating may run SteamOS
due to the built-in Steam button. Now, it's totally possible it still runs Windows
and that's just a Steam shortcut. We can't know, which I'm gonna say
is also somehow Dbrand's fault. Blass also blasted over some images
to the verge of a larger, more proper successor
to the original Legion Go with an OLED display.
So expect these to make an appearance at CES next month along with an updated version of the Lenovo Legion glasses
that will let you play games on a virtual display while looking like the guy from CSI Miami.
Whoa, is that Horatio? Come on, take the glasses off.
I'm playing Elden Ring. Google has announced Android XR,
a new operating system to power headsets and smart glasses
until Google doesn't feel like doing that anymore. But unlike Project Tango and Google Daydream,
Android XR is gonna stick because it's part of the Gemini era
which we're already nearly two years into. That's like 84 Google years.
Google published a bunch of very Vision Pro-esque demos
of what they hope the software will look like. Although, to their credit,
they also let a number of journalists and influencers try it out on an unannounced Samsung standalone headset
running a Snapdragon XR2 plus Gen 2. So there must be something real here.
That unit is powered by an external battery pack but Google's also reportedly making progress
on smart glasses with an embedded display in optionally prescription lenses.
In all of their marketing materials for Android XR, Google can't not mention how them caring about AR again
has been made possible by Gemini. Gemini, Gemini, please tell your friends and neighbors
about Gemini. They don't even know they're in the Gemini era.
Must be horrible. Okay, you're already half cyborg at this point. You might as well stick around for the quick bits.
For day six of OpenAI's 12 days of announcements,
they added real time video input to ChatGPT's advanced voice mode.
A day after Google beat them to the punch with their own experimental version.
But OpenAI also added a Santa voice.
Just do not let your kids talk to him. He's too honest.
He won't hold back. For day seven, OpenAI added a projects feature
to ChatGPT which collects stuff.
Cool, hey, did you know you can talk to the AI podcast hosts
in Notebook LM now and tell them they're not real?
See what happens. Mozilla removed the do not track setting
in Firefox this week because really, all it does is ask websites not to track you
and hardly any of them actually listen. Mozilla says it's better to use a newer setting
based on the global privacy control standard. But as PC Gamer and others point out,
GPC simply asks websites not to sell the data
that it already collected from you. This actually lines up with other recent moves
Mozilla has made to standardize collecting and selling truly anonymous data,
leaving it bland and tasteless. I mean, if you can't blackmail someone with it,
what's the point? Microsoft recently re-released a preview build of Recall,
its controversial activity history feature for co-pilot plus PCs, promising increased security
and privacy and it's already screenshotting credit cards
and social security numbers, okay. Tom's hardware found that the filter sensitive
information setting which is toggled on by default and is supposed to block that behavior
only really worked on a couple of shopping websites.
To be fair, it is still in preview and Microsoft's letting people test it
so they can fix this kind of stuff by asking the AI to please stop doing that.
That's what software dev is now. The European Union's oversight body
has confirmed that an ad campaign commissioned
by the European Commission broke the EU's own
data protection rules. The finding was triggered by a complaint
from digital rights nonprofit Noib who pointed out that the commission used
data-driven micro-targeting in a campaign to sway public opinion on a controversial EU
legislative proposal known as chat control. The EU data protection supervisor
has issued a reprimand to the European Commission
but not a fine due to the risk of taking this too far
and having Europe explode due to a logical error.
Does not compute. Oh no wait, it's Europe. Does not compute.
And the 2024 game awards happened last night and while the Half-Life 3 rumors were obviously incorrect,
there were some cool game announcements which you can see on screen here
because if I point any of them out specifically, you'll comment, no mention of Xenostar cross
sword chronicles road to Valyria? No, no mention.
I will tell you which game won game of the year though. Astrobot.
Probably because it was a really good game. It would also be really good if you came back here
on Monday for more tech news and watch out for any autonomous cars on the way over.
Waymo says its cars are officially certified against crashing into emergency vehicles now
which they apparently weren't before despite driving on the road for a long time.
So just be careful, okay?